Concept

Art, photography, literature: three awards for as many rapidly evolving languages. Joint objective: make art and values, ethics and aesthetics, communicate again, now as then, strongly believing that in the age of global communication it is possible to ask art bold questions. To know where we are going to and where we start from.

Communication and art have always maintained a close and important relationship with each other. Where there is community, there is a need of communication, not only between individuals, but also between the individual and the social body represented by institutions, those public entities that guarantee and preserve the common values on which the very sense of community is based.

Art, on the other hand, is the first and most important means of communication: the most effective. Not only has it always been a mirror of society, able to reveal its hidden and deepest traits, thus giving new interpretations of reality, often anticipating which way society is moving; art is also the most extraordinary laboratory of experimentation of languages, able to imagine new ideas to be expressed as well as new ways of expressing them. Such ability is far more valuable when it comes to literally giving substance to concepts, which are immaterial, abstract, and essential for the individual and for civil coexistence.

Thanks to this vocation, for a long time in the past art was able to live and flourish in close contact with the public sphere and its different incarnations, be it religious, political or economic. This close relationship has its cradle in the Mediterranean, in Mesopotamian and Egyptian art first, and in Greek and Roman art later: it could not be otherwise, since it was here that the institutional idea of public and community dimension was actually born, in the form of polis or res publica as the case may be.

It all started in the Mediterranean: here, since the very beginning, art was something more than a mere exercise in style: it was rather a means of remembrance and foresight, a crossroads between the past and the future. It is exactly to this idea of art that the Blumm Prize project is addressed: every year artists from all over the world are invited to represent a founding value of the delicate relationship between citizens and Institutions. Principles like transparency, identity, trust, happiness literally take shape and, year after year, form an ideal map of that still unexplored in-between land – half public, half private – where each part of civil society lives.